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Internationally best-selling crime novelist Karin Slaughter may have the perfect last name for her preferred genre—and yes, it’s her real name. (She gets that question a lot!)

The wildly popular author of 17 books, including the Will Trent and Grant County series and the explosive New York Times best-seller Pretty Girls, is back with a new standalone novel. Slaughter’s latest hair-raising tale, The Good Daughter (William Morrow), follows two sisters, Charlie and Sam, who struggle to piece together the details of a horrific crime that tore their family apart in their childhood.

Read on for a look inside Slaughter’s research process, what inspires her and why she thinks libraries are so important.

Slaughter is your real name. Is that something that shaped you as a writer?

I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t decide to write romances! When I first got published, I never understood why people kept asking me if Slaughter was really my last name. I didn’t understand the connection they were making because it had just always been my name. Then I was in the Piccadilly tube station going up one of those treacherous escalators and I saw this massive sign that said “SLAUGHTER” and I thought, Wow, that’s ominous, and then I got closer and saw the tiny “Karin” above it and thought, Oohhhhh…

Did you do any kind of research for The Good Daughter?

In the beginning, I was really worried about solving the puzzle of how to get into the mind of a defense lawyer. In many cases, they know their client is guilty, or they know that their client did a bad thing, yet their job is to make sure their client gets off with the least amount of punishment. That’s anathema to how I think—and to how most people think, I would imagine.

It wasn’t until I spoke with a couple of defense lawyers that I clicked into how a lot of them do the job. One woman represented mostly juvenile cases, and she said that her job was to make sure the prosecutor did not overcharge her clients. She saw her job as making sure that the other side played fair. That was an important distinction to me, because it made sense.

That conversation really put me inside Charlie’s head, because that’s the kind of lawyer she is, an advocate in every sense of the word. She doesn’t like playing the game, but she knows how it works, and she understands that what she does for a kid could mean the difference between having the opportunity to straighten out, get married, have kids, live a good life OR land in prison, develop a serious drug problem, learn the animalistic skills that come from serving hard time, and then eventually, maybe, get released back into the world a completely changed person whose options are very limited.

What was your inspiration for the book?

I really enjoyed writing about the sister relationship in Pretty Girls, my last standalone, and I wanted to do something more in that vein. When I thought of Charlie and Sam, it was almost in opposition to Claire and Lydia [from Pretty Girls].

I wanted Charlie to be a character I haven’t written about before. She’s highly competent, well-liked, and she makes mistakes, sometimes really stupid mistakes, but instead of trying to weasel around them, she owns them. Actually, she almost wears them as a badge of honor. That’s an interesting way to control the bad things that happen, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the best way. Sam, on the other hand, lives every single moment of her life in stark relief to the “what could have been.” She works very hard to define herself as having moved on, but everything she does is in opposition to that goal. Both sisters try to control things in their own way, and both fail in their own way.

How important is it for you to tell stories with strong female voices?

I write the voices that I hear in my everyday life. It’s funny, because I grew up in the South surrounded by incredibly strong women who, in some cases, were beaten down almost every day of their lives, yet they still got up every morning and made sure there was food on the table on clothes on their kids’ backs. This was the reality. The perception, though, was that women were the weaker sex, that they should defer to men. Almost every spoken message I got was to be demure and obsequious, but in practice, all the women were doing the exact opposite.

Is the writing process different when writing a standalone novel compared to a series novel?

Standalone and series novels each have their own challenges; it seems like it would be easier to write a Will Trent book because I’ve known him and I’ve written about Sarah from the very beginning. But the challenge is to say new things about them that aren’t surprising. I have to figure out ways to make them interesting to people.

But when I’m doing a standalone, the big challenge is I go back and read it from the beginning and say, “OK, is the Charlie you see at the end of this novel as believable as the Charlie in the beginning?” I don’t want someone who is very timid to be kicking butt at the end; I want her journey, for lack of a better word, to make sense. That’s sometimes more challenging in a novel, because as you’re writing this character you are getting to know them as well.

Why do you think thrillers appeal to such a wide audience these days?

I think a lot of people have these preconceptions about what a thriller is like or what a mystery is like. There’s short chapters and there’s a car chase on every page. If you think about Gillian Flynn or Michael Connelly, we’re really writing about people, and ordinary people who have very bad things happen. To me, that’s the interesting story and it’s a universal story. I think that I’m in good company when I’m writing crime novels.

Tell us about the Save the Libraries Foundation.

Save the Libraries Foundation was started in 2008 when the economy went to the toilet. I am someone who has always toured libraries, and I noticed that some of my favorite librarians were no longer there. I noticed, just in my own community, that the hours were cut at the local branch and we had a lot of kids on the street that would normally be in the library. This is something I feel very strongly about, because as a child the library was my haven. You can talk to Lee Child, Mike Connelly, Neil Gaiman, Laura Lippman, just a cast of any authors, and they’ll tell you the libraries were probably the most important thing they had when they were growing up. We all decided, well, we need to give back.

I did a fundraiser in my library system, and we had Kathryn Stockett and Mary Kay Andrews come in. I also partnered with the Indigo Girls to do a concert in Atlanta to raise funds. We did block grants to libraries around the country, some in Europe and some in England. We said, “If you have a need, here’s some money, you know what you need, buy what you need,” and so far we have given away over $300,000.